


The Vegetable Sack

by phantasmist



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Humor, KakaObi, M/M, No Uchiha Massacre, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-25
Updated: 2017-07-25
Packaged: 2018-12-06 21:56:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11609739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phantasmist/pseuds/phantasmist
Summary: Obito likes to keep covered up. Kakashi thinks the vegetable sack is more embarrassing than the scars.





	The Vegetable Sack

When his mask broke on a mission in Cloud, Obito stole a bag from a street vendor and wore it over his head for the whole two weeks it took them to wrap things up and get home. He stabbed a single hole through one side of it with a kunai, and this gaped raggedly and allowed no more than a peek into darkness, or sometimes the flash of sharingan. He didn't take it off to sleep. When they visited a bath house to celebrate a job well done, he stripped off everything _but_ the bag, and reclined back in the misty water like a pale, creepy scarecrow.

"You're not hiding the rest of the scars," Kakashi pointed out.

"Not right now." Obito didn't lift his damp bag-head up from the edge of the pool he was reclining in. It was late. The place was full of shadows and lamplight, wet heat, and they had it all to themselves. And so Kakashi was the only witness to his friend's startling nakedness. The crooked seam down his center, the massive scarring the accident had left, the rippled false-flesh that had been grafted over the pieces of him that the landslide had smashed beyond recovery. Hideous details over the slender smallness, the Uchiha-perfection of a lithe form.

Uchiha were vain creatures. Madara had crafted bone and muscle back together with exquisite precision. There was no limp, no hitch, no stiffness in the body he had put back together. Only quickness and grace. But somehow he just hadn't been able to do as much for the outside. Maybe he had run short on pieces, or something. Kakashi thought it must have irked the old monster to leave his project so creased by scars. But he had done it. And it didn't matter. Really, it didn't. Except that Obito was an Uchiha, and vain as well.

———

"The bag isn't any better," Kakashi pointed out, days later. Picking up the conversation as the two of them were stopped for lunch in a little outpost village. Obito had hiked the bag up over his nose to eat his noodles. The eyehole was out of place. He had grown his hair long, another thing Kakashi blamed Madara for, and snaggly tendrils of it were sticking out from the tear. Either Obito was peering through the rough fabric itself to aim with his chopsticks, or he was somehow managing to eat without seeing quite what he was doing. Kakashi wasn't sure. It was a little unnerving.

"Are _you_ going to lecture me about wearing a mask?" he scoffed.

"The mask is one thing," Kakashi pointed out. "This is not a mask. This is a vegetable sack. It actually _says_ vegetables across it, Obito. You're embarrassing us."

"Me? I'm embarrassing us? What is this?" Obito reached over both their lunches and snatched the book out of Kakashi's other hand. He flipped it around in front of him, elbowing Kakashi right in the throat to keep him from grabbing it back, examining the pink cover with the buxom damsel on it and then flipping through the pages. He stood halfway up from the bench they were seated at, jacked one arm back, and hurled the book toward the road.

In the fight that ensued, there was no further discussion of the vegetable sack.

———

"Have you seen my gloves?"

They were rustling through the familiar pre-dawn routine of putting their motel room in order, getting all their stuff packed up, readying for another long day of journeying.

"They're with your vest."

"They're not." Obito checked the vest again anyway. He went through the pockets. He circled the chair it had been hung over, got on the floor to look under the bed, groped through the sheets, and then started opening all the dresser drawers.

"Lose them?" Kakashi asked.

"I guess." Obito stood distractedly at the center of the disarray.

It was the first time Kakashi really noticed it. The fact that Obito had started wearing masks after he was returned to the village was obvious. He hid his face. It wasn't totally unusual for a shinobi. Lots of people had things they didn't want other people to see. Kakashi himself preferred to keep a little mystery. That was simple. People too often mistook him for his father, or just remembered his father when they laid eyes on him, if he didn't. But Obito took it a little farther than usual. He covered his face, his neck. His shirts were long-sleeved. He wore gloves. And, even in the worst heat of the Leaf's summer when everyone else was in sandals, black boots. All of him was covered up in public, always. And the face even in private. What Kakashi had assumed up to that point was just some strange, awful fashion sense he had picked up from Madara, he suddenly saw as something else.

"I guess we could find another sack for your hand," he teased.

Obito's good hand came up to cover his scarred one, and Kakashi winced.

"Here." He pulled his own gloves out of his pack, crossed the room, and jammed them onto Obito. "Try not to lose them too. I want them back, when we get home."

"They don't fit," Obito complained. But he tugged them down gratefully, so that the edges overlapped the ends of his sleeves and there was no sliver of pale skin to be seen.

———

Four days from home, they hit an ambush. It went badly. Worse for the other side, but still badly, and that evening Obito's _I'm fine, get off me_ came exactly a dozen steps before he collapsed. Kakashi picked him up and found a dense, dark hollow in the trees, and hid them there. He went through the basic medical routine, and was stitching shut a wound in his own thigh when his friend woke back up.

"Where's my vegetable sack?"

"I took it off you, moron."

Of all the things to be worried about. Obito's bare hands came up to touch his face, then his uncovered arms in their bandages. He looked down and registers the torn leg of his pants, the boots Kakashi pulled off so he could splint the naked ankle. Obito sighed. He let his head drop back. The fire between them crackled and sparked. In dim warm light, Uchiha hair looks dark brown, rather than black. Uchiha skin looks golden.

"Wish Rin was here," he said softly.

And that hurt. In the silence, Kakashi put the last stitch in his thigh and bundled the medical supplies away, and sat for a moment looking at the blood on his fingers.

"She could have... because she was a medic," Obito added. Like maybe he had just looked past his own pain, what the words meant to him, and realized what they meant to Kakashi. 

"Yeah."

And a long, strained pause. Obito sighed. He folded his hands over his stomach and stared straight up, into the darkness of the branches and leaves over their heads, the canopy hanging so thick it blotted out the stars, so distant the firelight couldn't touch it.

"I think sometimes," he began, in sort of a tense and worried tone. What he was going to offer now, he was offering because he knew Kakashi wanted it, and he was trying to apologize for the callous remark about their lost teammate. Or maybe he was thanking Kakashi for playing nurse. "I just, you know, I think sometimes about how she would have felt. About the scars and all. She didn't even think I was much to look at before. So how would this seem to her? Or to anyone."

"Nobody would care."

"But you're totally gorgeous, dipshit. People fall in love with you all the time. Look at me. Who's ever going to look at me and say, oh yeah, that's him. That's the love of my life, that one with the completely fucked up face and the huge chunks missing from him. I want to wake up with that in bed with me every day for the rest of my life."

"To be honest, I think your personality is way more of an obstacle than your face, in terms of romance."

"Thanks, Kakashi. That's comforting."

"Your tomato plants are also a huge turn-off."

Obito gave an outraged little splutter, turning his head to stare up at Kakashi. "What's wrong with my tomatoes? They're completely delicious!"

"You grew them with those little... bodies, though..."

"I spent a year in a cave with a big tree that had a bunch of actual guys growing from it, okay? I'm traumatized. I can only express myself through gardening."

"Seems like kind of a creepy way to use the First's ability." And rather than continue the argument, Kakashi leaned down and kissed Obito, and his friend was caught so off guard that at first he actually kissed back.

———

"So the mission was a complete success?" Minato sat behind his desk and glanced between the two of them, taking in the bandages. Kakashi's black eye. The crutch Obito fashioned from a tree branch. The vegetable sack.

"Yep."

"Couldn't have gone smoother."

"And you two are on your way to the hospital now." It wasn't really a question. More one of those passive little commands.

"We are."

And so they were dismissed. And they left and headed toward Kakashi's apartment. Limping along, Obito pulled the bag from his head and stuffed it into one of the empty pockets of his vest. He kept his gaze cast downward, and missed the way some people stared, some people saw the scars and glance away a little too quickly, and others didn't notice at all. Kakashi watched them. It wasn't too bad, he didn't think. Really, the fact that Obito's hair was a crazy mess was probably drawing more attention than his face.

"It was actually pretty itchy," he admitted, with a cough.

"Guess you can get a new mask now," Kakashi said.

"Yeah, later." Obito looked up and squinted against the hazy noontime. "So, I need a shower. Like really badly. And I have to report to Fugaku too. But if you wanted to go somewhere later and get dinner."

"Sure." It was no more than what they always did, when they get back from a mission.

"Kakashi," Obito blurted. "You won't take it back, right?"

"Wanting to go to dinner?"

"No, I mean..." Obito took a kind of shaky breath. And Kakashi thought back on firelight. On pressing his lips to the fragile emptiness of one eyelid, and then the vulnerable, dangerous fullness of the other eye. All his friend's power, his heritage, right under Kakashi's mouth. Tracing startled tears down a scarred cheek.

"No," he promised. "I won't take it back."

And it was going to be a long time before Obito believed him, he thought. Before that doubt and fear, that nervous expectation of loss, completely faded. But this was a good start. He reached out and touched the back of his friend's gloved hand with his own knuckles. And he glanced sideways and caught just the briefest, most uncertain little flutter of a smile.


End file.
